www.nickhodge.com

After attempt­ing to install a dual chan­nel Haup­pauge card into the Gen­eral, with the asso­ci­ated soft­ware installs/deinstalls – Win­dows Media Cen­ter could no longer see any TV Tuner Cards. This had been bug­ging me all week.

As always, I am determ­ined not to go the de-install/re-install of Win­dows solu­tion to prob­lems. I’d much prefer to logic­ally think through the prob­lem, and learn along the way.

I found that the ehRecvr ser­vice was fail­ing to start with a “file not found” error (check in the logs in

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Temp\) … and fur­ther check­ing showed ehRecvr was attempt­ing to read a value from the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Cen­ter

Com­par­ing this branch of the registry with a known-good ver­sion, I found that some­thing had lopped sig­ni­fic­ant sub-branches off such as “…\Start Menu\…” – in fact, only 3 branches exis­ted in my registry.

I sus­pect that one of the de-installs in the swap­ping from Haup­pauge to/from DVico caused this, and a quick export/reimport and all is well. Sub­sequently, com­pon­ents of the Win­dows Media Cen­ter soft­ware were set into a strange half-state of working.

Hope this helps someone.